Jakes and Lenart may have sided with the Russian enemy in 1968, but it is not clear what the state gains by beating a dead regime with yet another trial.

Now focus on the postcommunist states, where a new wave of treason trials seems about in the offing. The prosecution in the Czech Republic of two 78 year old men (Milos Jakes, and Jozef Lenart), both veterans of the Soviet invasion of 1968, and the four year long trial in Vladivostok of Grigory Pasko, a Russian naval officer, suggest the earliest stages of a cycle where injured states respond to perceptions of betrayal with charges of treason.